It may be hard to believe, but for many folks outside Dallas, Nov. 22 is simply the Friday before Thanksgiving.

Here, it’ll be the Beatles at Yankee Stadium, Pearl Harbor revisited and South by Southwest all rolled into one. Nov. 22, as everyone in Dallas knows, is the 50th anniversary of the murder of President John F. Kennedy.

The date is stamped into Dallas’ soul.

An outsider to this city, such as myself, can practically feel the presence of Nov. 22, 1963. It hangs heavy in the air like the West Texas dust on a sweltering summer afternoon. It’s the grit of civic guilt mixed with awkward, uncomfortable pride at having survived, confronted and outlasted that terrible event with dignity, style and — dare I mention? — a seven-story tourist attraction.

This year’s commemoration, I’m certain, will be a magnificent event. There will be dignitaries and celebrities. Buildings will be freshly lit, the grass will be cut, and the homeless and conspiracy hawkers shooed away. Dealey Plaza will be resplendent.

Enjoy it (if such a thing is allowed on this sort of occasion). And then, let’s move on. Cut the emotional tether, Dallas, to the JFK assassination. It’s time to quit being defined by this sad yet compelling event.

The only American city so closely linked to a tragic event decades after its occurrence is Honolulu, to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Eventually, perhaps, Oklahoma City and the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building and New York City and the attack on 9/11 will fall into the same category — although it’s hard to imagine Manhattan, 40 years from now, being infected with the same obsessiveness gripping Dallas.

And if those places remain linked to their tragedies, at least the cities will remain sympathetic victims, as targets of outside attack. Not Dallas. Seen as openly hostile to JFK, the city became an instant villain in the Kennedy family tragedy. And because the shooting ended the Camelot myth and sent the country into the grime of Vietnam and then Watergate, Dallas was seen as a co-conspirator in the slaying of the nation’s innocence.

Embracing our role as history’s fall guy is not healthy. It’s time for our city to stop playing the role.

The headline on a recent front page in this newspaper stated, “Kennedys reconcile with city.” Glad to hear it.

But the key question isn’t really how the Kennedys feel about us. It’s why, 50 years later, we still care so much.

Most Dallasites today don’t have a single connection to Dallas in Nov. 22, 1963. According to the U.S. census, only 326,000 people living in Dallas in 2010 were even alive when JFK was assassinated. Now factor in how many of those people had moved here in the last 50 years — and the number who have died in the past three.

We’re talking maybe a hundred thousand people in a city of more than 1.2 million who have any link to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. And yet, the obsession continues. By the 75th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, there will be almost no one alive who can remember that day.

I look across Dallas today and don’t see a city hostile to the Kennedy ideal, but rather, a city reflective of those ideals. We are a city that’s majority brown and black. A Democratic stronghold. Our image is evocative not of anti-Kennedy Morning News publisher Ted Dealey or former U.S. Army Gen. Edwin Walker, a John Birch Society sympathizer, but rather, of Kennedy allies Cesar Chávez and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

That’s the image we should be embracing: of the city JFK would have dreamed of, not the city where the dream ended.

Of course, history — and historical tourism — is important. The Sixth Floor Museum should always be an integral part of our city. Personally, I think a prominent statue of JFK has been overdue on Dealey Plaza. But it should be a monument to the man and his vision, not the assassination that ended it — and that, for too long, has occupied our attention and energy.

As a relative newcomer to this remarkable place, as a Texan and American who was alive on Nov. 22, 1963, and who lived the post-drama of the next five decades, let me say it clearly and loudly:

It’s not your fault, Dallas.

Commemorate this 50th. Then let it go.

Ralph De La Cruz is a Dallas Morning News editorial writer. His email address is rdelacruz@dallasnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DeLaCruzDMN.